Life has been busy lately and my blog has had to take a back
seat to real world events, still when I opened up Facebook (any good writers
source for fast and accurate news) and saw that Lou Reed, singer and creative
force behind The Velvet Underground’s best work, champion of freaks and
weirdoes everywhere, died this morning, I knew I had to write something.
Immediately I
tried to nail down a title. “The king is dead” came to mind first, because
apparently I’m a terrible writer who loves overwrought clichés. Quickly
realized, not only is that headline completely lame, but wasn’t even close to
accurate.
Lou wasn’t a king. Brilliant as he was, the
poor bastard seemed to get overshadowed a lot, be it with the Velvet’s as Andy
Warhol’s sideshow, or later, during his glam days, as David Bowie’s right
hand... Person? Alien? Androgynous life form?
The 70s were weird, man.
That being said, Reed
seemed to relish the shadows. Probably, I think, because as his songs so often
demonstrated, in the shadows, in the gutter, you can do whatever the fuck
you want.
He could write songs that
rival Leonard Cohen or Neil Young in their dark beauty, but so often
he went in the opposite direction simply out of spite it seemed.
I tried to listen to Reed’s
1975 feedback opus Metal
Machine Music this morning with my speakers on full blast. I only made it
17 minutes and 12 seconds into the hour and a half long album, but I defy
anybody reading this to listen to 5 minutes of that thing without developing a
major headache.
In the coming days and
weeks, journalists, bloggers, musicians and artists all over the world will
weigh in on Lou’s impact in the fields of music, art and culture. I’m sure
others will be able to articulate the man’s value far better then I ever will,
so this is all I’m going to say: Lou never did anything predictable and he
never did anything the easy way.
That stubborn,
self-destructive ethic earned him the moniker “The Godfather of Punk,” and
while you couldn’t ask for a cooler title, I don’t think Lou Reed ever properly
fit into that box either. No trite analogy or half-assed classification could
ever define the man or hint at the impact his art left on the world.
No, Lou Reed is simply Lou
Reed, no title necessary.
